April 12th, 2008 by cutter
Spoiler: If you are one of the three people in the country who has not seen There Will Be Blood, then you won’t want to read this post.
Very busy around Brooklyn this week. I could start many places, but Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing, you may have heard, never was brought to the floor for a vote. I read some interesting articles about urban renewal, and I hear that in Long Island City (It’s one of those more urban Queens nabes) the city is planning on building lattices around the elevated subway (I guess that’s the 7 train?–must be) with a water collection system. The idea is to grow plants and flowers all around the circumference of the train and to bring in the birds and the bees. The idea will be that when you look up to the train rather than seeing the nasty old grimy city scape, you’ll catch a bit of a garden hovering in the air. Very cool idea, and it got me thinking about doing related work in my classes. There’s a movement at St. John’s to push for service learning, and since urban renewal is a growing interest of mine, if I were to incorporate service in my classes, it would be on the level of urban development and renewal. What role could my students and I help play in making this city a better place? Better start crackin’ on this.
I showed There Will Be Blood in classes this week as students will be next writing critical reviews. I’m leaning towards having them put together film reviews but I’m open to other genres as well. We’re reading Christopher Orr’s essay at The New Republic as one of our models, and Orr takes M.T. Anderson to task, especially for the ending. I remember when I first saw the film (I’ve now seen it four times) that I was so blown away about how darn good the film was, how sound and measured and careful the story line is, how perfect the acting is, and how believable each gesture, glance and look . . . I wanted to love the film, I wanted to love the ending, and I do love the ending, very much. It works for me, but the problem isn’t with the end, it’s with the hop to the end. We move from Little Boston and next thing you know H.W. and Mary are getting married. Twenty years flashes by in an instance, and maybe we were supposed to already know that Daniel Plainview’s character formation completed itself while he was in Little Boston and that the next two decades would only be a matter of his following the same greedy, hateful path. But we also know that D.P. is capable of love–he’s hardly stereotypical–and we also know that he was engaged in other major projects over the next twenty years, and since we do, isn’t it fair to assume that he would have had many other relationships with others, others as important as Eli? In any case, the film is incredible to me. Is it flawed? Of course it is. But it would be flawed if it were perfect–if you catch my rhetorical drift.
Some of my students have become rather strong bloggers. I look forward to reading their posts on a daily basis. I try to comment as much as I can. There are a few who come to mind right away who write with the best of them. Some really good stuff, and seeing this fresh work causes that old image that anyone can be a writer to present itself. But today I’m no fool.
I joined Facebook last weekend. I like it. I have installed a zombie application and have been biting people. I attacked a couple of friends, but they didn’t seem to mind. Donna’s zombie slapped me upside the head when I attacked, and I wound up losing. I went and bit some chumps, got my power up and returned to Donna’s zombie and treated her to some chomping madness. I danced and pounded my zombie chest.
I presented to faculty on the website Ning that I wrote about before, and once I get my screencast up on google video, I’ll post it. We had a good talk about integrating blogs and other media into the classes, and I’m slated to give some workshops/tutorials at the end of the semester. I got meetings this week, faculty observations, and the like. A few of us are going to pilot teaching with Ning and we’re going to start using the space for faculty virtual discussions. I’ll include future posts.
One last thing. I just found out today that Adam Koehler accepted a position at Manhattan College. Adam and I met at RSA a few years ago and hit it off. I’m excited that he’s moving out here, and I hope that he sends me an email so we can set up a meeting when he comes out here to look around.
March 27th, 2008 by cutter
I’ve been away a little long. Thinking, I can assure you, about nothing else than the next blog post. So here’s a little piece of my manuscript. One part I’ve been considering cutting. But, as you writers know, such decisions are hard.
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Mathesis and resemblance.
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all relation.
–John Donne
The problem confronting the cyberneticians had already been encountered by Descartes in a similar way who had hoped that his Discourse on Method would, as apparatus theorists Michael Hobart and Zachary Schiffman say, “lay the foundation for an analytical vision of knowledge based upon mathematics, in which symbolic language would supplant natural language as the most effective means for organizing and managing information” (108). As Hobart and Schiffman explain (and as the popular story goes), Descartes’s purpose for turning towards mathematics was a feeling of disenfranchisement from the rhetorical training he had received. Where rhetorical training during the Renaissance had promised wisdom, none of the scholastics could have predicted the power of Gutenberg’s printing explosion. It is no stretch to suggest that the turmoil expressed in the poem by Donne (above) has a strong correlation with the incertitude associated with the increasing numbers of (contradictory) books made available by the printing press. For Descartes, mathematics provided a renewal of science for discovering the moral wisdom promised by philosophy and rhetoric that could not be delivered. Hobart and Schiffman write:
What is there about mathematics - so forbidding and mysterious for so many - that animated Descartes’s unbounded confidence in it”? Why did he and others after him believe that the “imagination mathematical” . . . was capable of coping with the deluge of information so troubling to the order-seeking minds of the age? Natural language and the classifying impulses it had shaped over the centuries proved themselves incapable of responding to the crisis. Overflowing with information, the old classificatory categories had become useless for discernment or discovery amid natural and social flux. (114)
Rather than answering the Nietzschean sense of Heraclitean flux or the Bergsonian sense of duration, classical rationalism could offer little hope in thinking in terms of temporality. Hobart and Schiffman, who tell the story that goes by their title from the ancients to the information age Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution, don’t realize it but echo Žižek’s point made by the acephelous knowledge of modern science.
While Descartes’s intentions may have been fueled by the desire to pair scientia (ordered knowledge) with sapientia (ordered knowledge of the divine, i.e. wisdom) so to achieve the latter, Descartes would unwittingly separate the two.
The invention and application of the printing press can be seen as responsible for issuing in a proliferation of knowledge overwhelming at the time. What mathematics or mathesis promises is, according to Michel Foucault, above all, order. Fredrich Kittler has accused Michel Foucault of limiting himself to analyzing discourse (see the introduction to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter) at the risk of ignoring the impact technological innovations have had on the history of thought.
If only we could respond to Kittler by pointing out that nobody writes like Foucault, that nobody manages so much in such a little space, that nobody openly works through problems in his writing as Foucault does and shares that thinking with his readers, that he, as Foucault said of Nietzsche, wrote such good books. That response cannot do. Kittler is right that Foucault ignores technological innovations and beyond the influential factors between the two figures, it is the effects and not the causes of historical discontinuities that would give us the patterns to see through the masterful weaving of Foucault’s writing loom so much that Western popular discourse has obscured. All that is needed for those who concern themselves with why the beginning of the seventeenth century marked a radical shift in how knowledge would be ordered is to plug Gutenberg’s machine into the split between Renaissance Resemblance and Classical Representation in Foucault’s Les mots et les choses. If we were forced to choose which story we should believe, Descartes’ disenfranchisement with rhetoric which ushers in a new age or the umpteen other changes Foucault’s comparison of Renaissance similitude with the ordering of the classical age, can there be any doubt which yields more food for thought? Prior to the Classical order of the age of Descartes, Foucault tells us what language was like:
In the sixteenth century, real language is not a totality of independent signs, a uniform and unbroken entity in which things could be reflected one by one, as in a mirror, and so express their particular truths. It is rather an opaque, mysterious thing, closed in upon itself, a fragmented mass, its enigma renewed in every interval, which combines here and there with the forms of the world and becomes interwoven with them: so much so that all these elements, taken together, form a network of marks in which each of them may play, and does in fact play, in relation to all the others, the role of content or of sign, that of secret or of indicator. In its raw, historical sixteenth-century being, language is not an arbitrary system; it has been set down in the world and forms part of it, both because things themselves hide and manifest their own enigma like a language and because words offer themselves to men as things to be deciphered. The great metaphor of the book that one opens, that one pours over and reads in order to know nature, is merely the reverse and visible side of another transference, and a much deeper one, which forces language to reside in the world, among the plants, the herbs, the stones, and the animals. (35; my emphasis)
The move from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, does much more than mark a distinction between sciencia and sapientia (even if the intention was to separate them for the purposes of bringing them back together); Foucault tells us that to know the divine is nothing less than to discover the unarbitrary resemblances between words and things that present themselves mysteriously to be deciphered. Here I quote Foucault at length:
The world is covered with signs that must be deciphered, and those signs, which reveal resemblances and affinities, are themselves no more than forms of similitude. To know must therefore be to interpret: to find a way from the visible mark to that which is being said by it and which, without that mark, would be like unspoken speech, dormant within things. . . [During the sixteenth century] divination is not a rival form of knowledge; it is part of the main body of knowledge itself. Moreover, these signs that must be interpreted indicate what is hidden only in so far as they resemble it; and it is not possible to act upon those marks without at the same time operating upon that which is secretly indicated by them. This is why the plants that represent the head, or the eyes, or the heart, or the liver, will possess an efficacity in regard to that organ. . . . The project of elucidating the “Natural Magics,” which occupies an important place at the end of the sixteenth century and survives into the middle of the seventeenth, is not a vestigial phenomenon in the European consciousness; it was revived - as Campanella expressly tells us - because the fundamental configuration of knowledge consisted of the reciprocal cross-reference of signs and similitudes. The form of magic was inherent in this way of knowing. And by the same token, so was erudition: for, in the treasure handed down to us by Antiquity, the value of language lay in the fact that it was the sign of things. There is no difference between the visible marks that God has stamped upon the surface of the earth, so that we may know its inner secrets, and the legible words that the Scriptures, or the sages of relation to these texts is of the same nature as the relation to things: in both cases there are signs that must be discovered. But God, in order to exercise our wisdom, merely sowed nature with forms for us to decipher (and it is in this sense that knowledge should be divinatio), whereas the Ancients have already provided us with interpretations, which we need do no more than gather together. Or which we would need only to gather together, were it not for the necessity of learning their language, reading their texts, and understanding what they have said. The heritage of Antiquity, like nature itself, is a vast space requiring interpretation; in both cases there are signs to be discovered and then, little by little, made to speak. In other words, divinatio and eruditio are both part of the same hermeneutics. . . There is no difference between marks and words in the sense that there is between verifiable fact and tradition. The process is everywhere the same: that of the sign and its likeness, and this is why nature and the word can intertwine with one another to infinity, forming, for those who can read it, one vast single text. (32-34; last emphasis mine)
Although Foucault continually returns to the role of interpretation in this passage, we would be mistaken to ignore how our own notions of hermeneutics must be - of necessity because of the arbitrariness of language - fundamentally and radically different. What is at stake and what has made all the difference is the middle space that binds words and things. Much is often made of Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the signature, but Foucault’s discussion of the signature - where God himself wrote upon things their names, names that correspond with the essence of the thing - is only one among the many other notions of resemblance and similitude that bring together what Foucault calls “the prose of the world.” This, if you will, “missing link” between words and things means that when we speak of interpretation today, we are already only speaking of meaning in the diluted sense of being the compliment, much like the Boolean 0 (negation) compliments the 1 (universe), to the sign. For the sixteenth century before Descartes, if the limits of thought were designated by the extent to which they could not be rolled into one (such as magic, divination, and knowledge), it was because everything in the world resembled and shared affinities with everything else; indeed, what is called the symbolic language today, so long as it is understood as dividing the world into discrete units (i.e. so long as it is a digital operation [in the sense of counting as in the digits of the hand]) did not exist, according to Foucault, for the sixteenth century, and, as Hobart and Schiffman also suggest, should be seen as distinct from what we can only after Foucault (truly) appreciate what is meant by natural language. Instead of the symbolic separating the real; instead of the unpresentable amorphous mass murmuring (to borrow Foucault’s term) beneath language, resemblance indicated that there was no gap between words and things because words were things themselves (reminiscent of my chapter on Harman) and corresponded to nature not through signification but through kinship; the various modes of similitude (aemulatio, convenientia, sympatia, analogia) that Foucault presents shows that words and things were connected in multiple, overlapping, and intersecting ways, in which, like a pair of snakes, “signs and their similitudes were wrapped around one another in an endless spiral” (32). In a way that appeals to our modern sense, Foucault calls this relationship between words and things as nothing less than an “infinite richness of resemblance introduced as a third term between signs and their meaning” (ibid.; my emphasis). Meanings are only polar ends of a middle that can only be expressed poorly by hyperbolic terms such as infinite, layered, rich, intersecting, blending, and so on.
Foucault’s ideal shines through his analysis as clearly as any argument made against him (that is, his nostalgia), a condition that creates little need for polemics here. This ideal would be whether the great excluded middle could ever be recovered. If we were to ask such a question now would only bring us back to a repetition of Foucault. (Or, we could go even further back into history, in a “return to the Greeks,” and bring back the middle voice where the middle was already at work in any utterance, as part of the linguistic structure.) Instead, what this analysis tell us is precisely that there is a long history of the severance of language from the world (logos as cosmos for the Greeks and logos as resemblance for the Renaissance). What needs to be added to this analysis is the role of technology that begins with Descartes.
February 26th, 2008 by cutter
It’s spring break, and I have a little extra time to return to my manuscript whose working title is Kairos, Nomos, Techne: Writing and the Possibility of Invention. The beginning of the post will be about the first chapter and will skip over the whole middle, touch base at the end, and suggest something new to my own thinking.
The major premise of the book is the relationship between the first two rhetorical terms (kairos and nomos). First of all, I find it crucial to reject the common rhetorical definitions of both of these terms, primarily because, to our secreting hivemind, the histories have been all too tacit in accepting them at face value. That’s why it’s so much fun to read someone like Agamben, since he reads the ancients archeologically, with both eyes focused on the spirit of the letter that’s never dead. As it is known in popular rhetorical studies, kairos is a term that means the “opportune moment,” so whenever one even mentions the idea, the typical response is to think about the popularization of the readings of Plato (especially the Phaedrus) where Plato said that kairos is the “capstone to the art of rhetoric,” that once the orator learns the skills of being an effective speaker, he learns when to speak and when to delicately pinch his eloquent mouth closed. I make the counter-move of not using Plato as the exemplar for kairos but using the sophists, and particularly the Pythagoreans. Gorgias, heavily popularized in today’s pomo academy as the sophistic “bad-boy,” can be said to have benefited from the two schools of the Pythagoreans. It’s discussing these two different schools (Heracliteans and Paremenideans) of the Pythagoreans where things get interesting. I’m influenced by an Italian rhetorician/philosopher/philologist (are there philologists anymore?) that has had some work recently translated. (Yeah, Italian is on my “bucket” list–but that’s a long list.) I’m talking about Augusto Rostagni. (Who I wish didn’t look like such a banker. The dude needs a beard and some crocs or something!)
Rostagni is ideal for many reasons, not the least of which is that he is not American, and his geographical separation from the states appears to afford him the advantage (from my perspective) of not having to be bothered with the party lines between philosophy and rhetoric that many working rhetoricians have grown accustomed to. Like Agamben, he reads the ancient texts conceptually rather than across disciplinary lines. I remember Stanley Fish, the fav of various “antifoundationalist” rhetors, saying that this quarrel was THE quarrel of Western civilization. Wait, I think I feel a yawn coming on . . . .
I’m glad that Rostagni takes us out of these territories (I’m over it—but thanks for asking!), since playing the role of victimed other does not appeal to me, and I appreciate the division between the disciplines even less. Talking about that split doesn’t help the role of rhetoric in relation to the academy or philosophy and has almost nothing to do with the conceptual relationship between the two histories, especially when we’re talking about what Heidegger called the “primordial thinkers.” In any case, Rostagni helps collapse the distinction between the disciplines through the term kairos and opens up the rather complex relationship between the many and the one. Kairos, I argue with Rostagni’s help, is not the “opportune moment,” but is every moment, and, as such, it is a force that bonds with the speaker, and the speaker, does not grab hold of the moment, but becomes an expression with, of, and for the moment.
I don’t mean to put the speaker in a position of being passive, because I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, but I certainly reject the speaker as some kind of spokesperson for carpe diem—which is what kairos in the Platonic lineage largely amounts to. (Henry V’s “St. Crispin’s Day Speech,” for example.) There is a relationship between the speaker and each moment, but it’s a feedback loop, or “a back-and-forth relatedness,” as Theodore Kisiel calls it.
But I can’t really bypass the issue between agency and passivity that pops up here. Sinthome at Larval Subjects has a very interesting post on this problem, and I have to thank him here for actually helping me realize some problems with my thinking for my book. (I’ll try to get around to this later in the post.) One might think that the reason I turn to these ancient discussions about kairos, nomos, techne, poeisis and so on is that I feel obligated to situate my writing in the rhetorical lineage, and that is partly true, but it is more true that I’m drawn to these ancient problems because they continually surface in the problems our collective hivemind faces today and that some of the most provocative members of our thinking colonies continue to grapple with them.
Take Deleuze, for instance, and specifically, the way in which Sinthome articulates the same problem of the relationship between speaker and kairos in Deleuzian terminology. Sorry for the upcoming lengthy quote, but I really like the way Sinthome puts this:
Deleuze’s account of individuation is that it overcomes the peril of thinking about entities abstractly by underlining both how entities emerge or come to be in relation to a milieu and how they are characterized by ongoing processual relations to that milieu. However, the danger here is that we end up with a sort of determinism or social and political “physics” where no agency is possible because the agent is simply the actualization of a pre-personal field not of its own making. For Deleuze Ideas or Multiplicities are problems. An Idea is not something that an agent thinkers or conceives, but is rather an ontological category characterized as a field of differential relations and singularities (potentials) that are solved over the course of an actualization. Thus, for example, any particular tree is the result of an Idea or Problem in the sense that it revolves a set of potentials characteristic of both its own genetic constitution in larval state and its unique environment. Similar, for Deleuze, agents are not the agents of their Ideas (multiplicities), but are the patients of our Ideas. We are results of these problematic fields, not the ones directing the course of events.
Rostagni gives an understanding of the paradoxical relationship of the many and the one that would help us see a strong relation with the kind of kind of kairos I’m advocating for and the situation that Sinthome describes. Resonating from Rostagni’s reading of the Pythagoreans is how he frames the discussion of kairos through two different forms of topos as they relate to kairos. In a fragment found in Anaximander Rostagni explains that these topoi or starting places, monotropia (one kind of speech) and polutropia (many kinds of speeches) are contingent upon a particular moment (an event as Deleuze would call it) but that moment has to be understood according to the paradox of the many and the one. In other words, take, for instance, Henry V’s St. Cripin’s Day speech I mentioned above. Before the battle, Henry understands that in order to motivate his soldiers, he has got to fill them with fire by arguing that they can overcome the crushing defeat they all expect to happen, or, if not, that they will die with a glory that will change, even in defeat, the course of England’s history. In Kenneth Branagh’s version, the soldiers gather round and as Henry speaks, there is a slow and gradual acceptance by the group that his words are true and even if they die, their deaths will have been mattered more than their lives. The artifice of the speech lies less in the words and the argument but in the acceptance of the soldiers. It points to the kind of moment that is seized upon by the orator, and by doing so, it abstracts the speaker from the environment or nomos (place). This is what Rostagni would call a monotropic speech that is given to those who all hear the same thing. But the artificial quality of Henry’s speech is overlooked if we don’t recognize that the soldiers are different, and that because they are, when Henry delivers a speech that is designed for one, it will not be received the same by all because each soldier hears a different speech because it is the same speech. The only way that each soldier would be able to hear the same speech would be if Henry delivered different (polutropic) speeches custom made for each soldier. This problem gets exacerbated when you group people together (childrens speeches should be made for children, political speeches should be made for the polis and so on). We all know that different groups hear different things based on a multiple number of factors (culture, history, education, class, and so on).
The natural philosophers would agree with Sinthome’s description of Deleuze: “An Idea is not something that an agent thinks or conceives, but is rather an ontological category characterized as a field of differential relations and singularities (potentials) that are solved over the course of an actualization.” That ontological category, although it is more robust and developed in Difference and Repetition has its roots in the paradox of the many and the one. Notably, this paradox does not simply relate to speeches but it is, for these thinkers, the geological condition of all things being in temporal flux and that any one actualization (a speech or a hiccough or the ripening of a grape or the starting of a car or the tree example above) is the expression of a moment that in our sensory awareness of it blinds us to the entire rest of the unactualized lifeworld. As Heidegger was fond of saying, truth is aletheia, a constant motion into oblivion.
Interestingly, Gorgias’s famous challenge to ask him to speak on any topic was followed by that he trusted in kairos to allow him to deliver a pleasing speech, but Gorgias had been influenced by the Pythagoreans and likely never thought that being in touch with the moment was a matter of losing one’s agency. I like to playfully imagine that he thought of himself as being a catalyst where he recognized his connection to the world. In any case, given the episteme and the language, the concept likely never crossed his mind. As Pierre Vernant has said, the rise of the subject is a very modern way of thinking, one that draws a line between humans and the earth, and one that, while expressed in the grammar of English, it does not exist in the ergative languages still in existence today.
Nonetheless, I really appreciate Sinthome’s explanation of how he reads how Deleuze resolves the tension between being an expression of a field of potentials and having a position from which to claim authority over them. I find the image of the torus in his post an interesting piece of information (a tell, maybe?). Do those images suggest another answer to the problem? I won’t venture there as I’d have to return to my long-neglected readings of Lacan, but I’d love to hear someone discuss how those images integrate with the rest of the post. In any case, Sinthome’s explanation for how Deleuze resolves the tension between agent and patient is interesting for me, particularly because he has helped me see something about the relationship between reading, writing, new media, and temporality that I could not quite fit together before. So a big thanks here.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze hooks us by talking about his different syntheses of time. Oh, if he’d have given us a bullet list of what they are. Between the various explanations are just about the whole book. Sinthome explains the second synthesis of time in a way that is similar to how Michel Serres has put it many times, but it is only now that the click has occurred for me. Basically, Serres (in Genesis) has said that we are in a continuous conversation with the ancients or writers of any time period, that the things separating us from other writers (time, culture, language, and so on) do not take their ideas out of circulation but those ideas, while their meanings have varying influences and speak to different ages according to the epistemologies of a particular age, they are not, to borrow Sinthome’s phrasing, “overcoded by that particular social field” (not a direct quote). Sinthome explains that memory works similarly. As beings occupying linear time, we are materially bound to our place in time, whether we are moving towards the future or the future is moving towards us (or both) doesn’t really matter as our bodies cannot leap over when we are. But the potentialities of the artifacts of history as well as our memories, however, are not also bound. In fact, it would appear that natural memory works according to a different logic than linear temporality. Just think about the thousands of day dreams you’ve had. If you’re like me, you’ll understand me when I say that there have been times where I have been absolutely transported to places and times in my past, times and places that had much more resonance than anything that was happening in the present. Sinthome writes: “The rediscovery of the text itself also introduces something into the field, creating a marginal space of freedom in which the subject can become agent, enjoying adventures that take him in directions other than the predominant structurations characterizing the social field.” So both of these things, memory and media, are time machines.
What is most interesting to me about this, especially as it ties to the subfield of computers and writing is how these two real temporalities are duplicated by our traditional and emerging reading and writing practices. Sustained long reading is analogous to chronic time (chronos), and the elements of digital writing (blogging, images, video, rich applications, and perhaps above all, social software and the coming virtual environments) are analogous to this kind of freedom associated with memory and transtemporal media consumption and enjoyment. Ironically, however, if we feel bound to chronos in our daily lives (same shit different day as the cliché goes), the hallmarks of literacy (the recent NEA report on declining literacy, for example) would proclaim that when speaking in terms of readin’ and writin’ that students are being shortchanged if they do not engage in sustained long reading.
But what I want to ask, what I am curious about, is to what extent the effects of Web 2.0 are having on the linear continuum that has been pretty much part of our common experience. Also, to what extent, then, is the rapid movement that can be explained by the continuous pushes and pulls of social-networking shifting our primary ways of living? We’re online writing our blog and our phone beeps. We see we got a text. We check it, reply, go back to our blog, a thought about something other than what we’re doing occurs to us, perhaps we’re thinking that maybe we should get one of those blog editing tools like Windows Live Writer (but support Microsoft?-yuk), but what open source tools are out there? Our email dings, the phone rings. . . . Surf the internet for a while and hop around reading all those pro-bloggers who make their living writing online or the many many developers writing blogs and so many others whose work and paycheck depend solely on their online productivity. Should we be surprised that there are so many microblogs or the popularity of facebook, Digg, Shareaholic, Friendster, Bub.blicio.us, sezwho, and so many other social networking sites? But it is just this social interconnectivity that is the cause for the push and pull. This social economy calls, tweets, reads, friends, comments, meets friends and friends of friends. In other words, social networking and internet writing calls us to follow multiple directions. Many of us are not living linear lives.
We and our students are continuously being invited to rapidly and schizophrenically switch codes and to follow many paths and to switch them again. If time spent on the internet engaging in social networking (both with others and with other machines) is a phenomena that sends us in multiple paths, to what extent is nonlinear temporal experience becoming dominant? If in our daily experience, we–like media and memory–travel across time instead of in or with time, at what point does this new conceptual and material orientation become common?
In my manuscript, I speak at length at the need to incorporate non-linear forms of invention from outside writing studies and bring them into the fold. I speak about the work of conceptual artists such as John Cage, Paul Miller, Fiona Tan, Eric Loyer, William Burroughs, Bill Viola, Dziga Vertov and others in order that we may learn lessons from them and 
begin incorporating similar methods into our pedagogies and research. Geof Sirc is one person who has been doing similar work for some time. I think that this is important work, but I am just now beginning to think that it’s not enough and that it relies still too heavily on the concept of the writer as working artist. Isn’t social networking already an example of multilinear forms of invention taking place? And even better, it’s something that has begun to happen on its own.
What I am now considering is how can the power of social networking be harnessed in a productive way where various forms of writing, using whatever media are relevant, can collectively emerge. There is one company that I came across last night who has already begun thinking in this direction. While they have systematized the problem solving process, they have done so in a way where communities come together in a systematic fashion to help bring ideas to fruition. This company is kluster, and while I need to check them out more thoroughly, I’m wondering what kind of application or inspiration might an organization like this have in solving the problems of collaborative writing.
February 24th, 2008 by cutter
After my discussion of an article idea yesterday, I received three pieces of helpful information to continue thinking about emergence and CMS’s. One came from a colleague over email and another shows up on Donna’s Blog where Scot adds a riff. I’ll start with the blog and then move to the email, which adds an interesting way to build the article more.
Reading Donald Watts’ Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, Donna pulls the following quotes:
How does individual behavior aggregate to collective behavior?
Although genes, like people, exist as identifiably individual units, they function by interacting, and the corresponding patterns of interaction can display almost unlimited complexity.
the particular manner in which they interact can have profound consequences for the sorts of new phenomena–from population genetics to global synchrony to political revolutions–that can emerge at the level of groups, systems, and populations. (27)
The post mentions that people who are interested in social action should be “studying networks.” I couldn’t agree more. Speaking about old school forms of protests driven by ideologies, Johnson in Emergence writes: “What they fail to recognize is that their can be power and intelligence in a swarm, and if you’re trying to do battle in a distributed network like global capitalism, you’re better off becoming a distibuted network youself” (226).
Scot makes a really good point about disconnections and friendships, reminding me of why I was reading Jean Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community in grad school. Of course, Scot is talking about, in my mind, a whole ‘no.ther theoretical territory, The Great Excluded Middle. What he says is very provocative, so let me quote him here.
Put somewhat differently, is there a productive place for disjunction or dis/connection within network models and if so what might this look like? I don’t have the best answer yet for this, but the abstract I wrote suggests that friendship (or at least Blanchot and Derrida’s version of friendship) might suggest a possibility for imagining networks less as near-limitless possibilities for connection and more as “communities without community,” to borrow Blanchot’s phrase. Such a network, if it’s right to call it that now, would highlight interruptive contacts over associative linkages, contacts extended, though not necessarily with commensurability, to an other who may or may not ever answer the call for aggregation.
One way to reinscribe the issue of disconnections into emergence theory is to consider them, as in cybernetics, as noise, i.e., as part of a larger field that cannot be inscribed into a system. If you approach this difficulty from the position of ethics and politics, then the reinscription that I am suggesting is a violence and a reduction to the important thought of the refusal to be connected.
In our field, we often hear arguments about the digital divide, between those who have access and those who don’t. But while those arguments are made, we hear little to nothing about the choice not to connect. This choice, as I see frequently, is not limited to students, but it is very strong in the humanities among everyday professors. We could speculate as to why, but I think we’d be close to offer the explanation that some people just don’t want to change, or to do more, or whatever. But what is at work in a situation like this, is a subject taking a position of resistance, a subject who does not write (or connect) because that subject is attached to an identity. This is different from, say, the Bartleby who “prefers not to.” The difference between those who resist and Bartleby is that Bartleby has no attachments to subjectivity or identity, he is what Agamben would call a “whatever being.” If you read through Agamben in the Coming Community, what you see is “The perfect act of writing comes not from a power to write, but from an impotence that turns back on itself and in this way comes to itself as a pure act (which Aristotle calls agent intellect). This is why in the Arab tradition agent intellect has the form of an angel whose name is Qalam, “Pen,” and its place is an unfathomable potentiality. Bartleby, a scribe who does not simply cease writing but ‘prefers not to,’ is the extreme image of this angel that writes nothing but its potentiality to not-write” (37).
To return to Scot’s thoughts, the difficulty involves this transition of moving from subject positions to whatever beings, and it is here where the inoperative community, the coming community, and the community without community is perpetually arriving.
In any case, there is a part 2 to this post. I have to think about how these ideas work with the email I received concerning anxiety in networked environments.
